"Archiving" Participants

Georgina RUFF

The Consequences of the Apparatus: Otto Piene’s Lichtballett

Session:Archiving 2

Panel:Presentation Session

Time:17.00-18.00

Venue:Stockholm School of Economics

ABSTRACT
The Consequences of the Apparatus: Otto Piene’s Lichtballett There are three necessary parts to a lamp: the bulb, the fixture, and electrical power. In 1959 at the darkened Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf, all of those components were obvious in the middle of the gallery floor – but they weren’t the focus of Otto Piene’s show. Instead, the walls, the ceiling and the floor were covered with spots of light that emulated the starry night outside and viewers moving through the space could not help but be covered in light themselves. Visual and atmospheric effects can be memorable, yet it is the lamp, easily overlooked, and the choice of which bulb, what fixture, and how much power that ultimately produces the effecting light. This study takes an argument between Otto Piene and scholar Karl Ruhrberg as the point of departure for an investigation into the historical moment of Piene’s illuminating apparati and how this Foucauldian “system of relations” activates and anchors these works while simultaneously differentiating them from the light experiments of Làzlò Moholy-Nagy 30 years earlier.(1) In installations of immersive light the lamp is the apparatus that mediates between the gallery viewer and Foucault’s “shifting heterogeneous elements:” the bulb manufacturer or the nostalgic connotations of the fixture or the political position of the artist. Through a close examination of iterations of Piene’s Lichtballett, this paper proposes a object based analysis for the effects of these early works of “Light and Space,” eschewing phenomenological readings in favor of illuminating connections between the physical technology and the mid-century viewer. Using archival letters written by Piene, original exhibition documentation, and contemporary critical accounts, this work refocuses the interpretation of these works from the lights on the wall to the lamp on the floor. 1.Michel Foucault “The Confession of the Flesh: a Conversation,” 1980.